Cool and damp, but clear. Should be another beautiful day. I’ll have to remember these days when I’m whining about how hot and muggy it is later on. Yesterday was gorgeous too. Moar plz!!111!!
Spent all of yesterday doing family stuff, preparing to do family stuff, or recovering from family stuff. A good day.
We’ll see what happens today, but I think I’ll be working at least part of the list. Maybe some more scrapping and salvage too. Ending the day with that is actually pretty satisfying, and then I can cash out first thing the next day.
I do have one pickup to make, out in Sealy. I won some locksmithing stuff. Kinda hard to tell for sure what it is, but there are some interesting key blanks, and some very nice commercial high security locks in the photos. Other than the drive out to Sealy being longer than I’d like, it’s the kind of lot I used to buy often, hopefully getting something that is hard to get through normal channels.
You never know what you might need in the after times.
Stack some weird stuff too.
nick
Monday! May the fourth be with you…
We had some rain here yesterday and overnight after a long dry spell, and the vegetation is going bananas. Fresh green and new blooms everywhere. Even our low-maintenance garden looks spectacular. W1 will be pleased…
Wishing you all a good start to the week. Nick, I hope your gastric upset has passed. The description had me howling.
“Small beer.” Not much alcohol, but no nasty germs, either.
Some years ago, my brother met an elderly gentleman from Somerset (south of England). The old boy drank only cider, had never drunk a glass of water in his life, and was appalled by the thought of it.
He explained that the drinking water of his childhood was not safe, and as his family were itinerant apple and fruit pickers, they made and drank cider.
One carried one’s cider in a costrel.
There is an old Jack Hargreaves Old Country or Out of Town video about costrels and traditional cider-making. Worth looking for.
@denis, so far, feeling better today…
57F but clear.
Coffee should be ready, first small cup anyway.
Thought I had enough paper lunch bags stored to last for the whole school year. Unless someone moved them, I did not. The backup bags are just a bit too small for the total snack fest the kid wants, so today I made do by picking smaller treats. I see a grocery store trip in my day today.
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Test your stored and stacked gear! Kid wanted a ‘speaker on a stick’ arrangement for her party. I have several loudspeaker things, powered speakers with multiple inputs, that mount on an aluminum tripod. I’ve got a box of mics and mic cables. Extra tripods. (The tripods are handy for antenna supports, starlink, speakers, backdrop supports. I buy them when they are cheap.)
THREE different speakers that I pulled out of the attic all failed to work. I’ve got 2 more systems at the secondary location, including a full set of Mackie speakers suitable for a small band or dj that I thought I tested. I didn’t grab the Mackies or yamaha speakers because I had some at home (sampson low end china crep, and others, but the sampson was in the box…) Good thing the rec association has one, because that was a prepper fail.
One I might have tested and just don’t remember it failing. But I know I never tested the sampson, it was ‘new in box. I should have known better.
I’ll add them to the “to be repaired” pile and I’ll find time to test the speakers at the secondary…
—————
Time to get these kids out the door.
n
At the last medical conference in Florida, I saw tripod speaker stands used as stands for 40-42″ flat screen displays at drug rep booths.
The repurposing caught my eye because both of my TV antennas in the attic are mounted on Pyle speaker stands.
A universal mounting bracket is apparently available, but I had a family emergency that week so my time wandering the show floor was limited.
I saw a lot of MacBooks where ThinkPads used to be BTW.
ThinkPads are generally easy for the corporate IT types to maintain and repurpose, particularly T series laptops, but some of the consumable parts have gone unobtainium with the Orange Man’s tariffs.
Lot of that going around.
Yesterday I wanted to run an Ethernet line from the router to my office.* I know where I had put the spool of wire, the box of RJ45s, the crimper, and the rest of the stuff. I know that I’m not the one who moved it. What could possibly explain the disappearance?
* I had a wifi signal detector. Wasn’t good for much but it did help to physically find devices which kept connecting to the router. We found a few items which had no reason to be connecting, doing so. All made in China, IIRC. Anyway, The Elder Child has it now, didn’t bring it back, and is now 1700 miles away.
Could the heat have killed them? You’ve mentioned that it gets unpleasantly warm up there.
I saw tripod speaker stands used as stands for 40-42″ flat screen displays at drug rep booths.
– Probably consumer tvs used as monitors too. Modern TVs are very light. I can mount or dismount a 65″ myself. Any bigger is still too heavy. I don’t think I could lift even a 48″ plasma by myself any more. The 55″ digital signage monitor I just picked up was very sturdy with steel back, handles, and a steel bezel. I didn’t have to lift it above my waist though.
———
n
Could the heat have killed them?
– that is a possibility. Usually electronics can be safely stored at a much higher or lower temp than they are listed to operate in though.
n
Bah. Left a few lines out of my previous comment: For a week and a half, my main computer has been having a lot of trouble staying connected to the router. I kind of need connectivity for work so this is more than a nuisance. It comes and goes, with connectivity being fine for 12 hours, then later not being able to stay connected for five minutes. This suggests a device being turned on and off or being brought into and out of the house by one of the aides.
This suggests a device being turned on and off or being brought into and out of the house by one of the aides.
– IP address conflict? The aide using a VPN or static address that overlaps your space? Assuming they are on your network…Or do you suspect a wifi (I typed ‘wife’ ) issue? Something purely RF related?
n
Some of the ubiquiti WAPs have built in survey tools that can reveal some surprising wifi stuff. Some wifi routers do too.
n
I suspect simple wifi interference, not IP address conflict, as I’m able to drop the connection and immediately reestablish it. Fixed IP address on my computer, so it’s not a matter of just grabbing the next one.
Chicken antics: weather’s good (or as good as can be expected for this location and time of year) so I figured I’d clean the chicken coop and other stuff and move the run. Let the birds out and into the garden and they all streamed out in the “peepslosion” that you may have seen. Less than five minutes into cleaning, one, a three-year-old hen who is often grumpy, started awwwking. I let her out and she bumbled around for a minute before going into the run and then going to the food bin. Then two others started awwwking so I let them all out, figuring they could wander around the yard while I worked. But no, one of the younger birds ran into the coop, obviously needing to lay. The older bird ran up and ejected the younger, then came down the ramp herself. They both went up again and there was some squawking, and they both came down. Then the younger started to go up and the older grabbed her by the foot and dragged her down, then they pecked each other for a moment. Then another went into the coop, resulting in more squabbling. I just got everyone into the run and left them to figure it out for themselves. I’d gotten maybe half of the dirty straw out of the coop and into the wheelbarrow, but it’s not hurting anything and I can resume the job in an hour.
Note that there are three bays in the coop, so you’d think that three hens could lay at the same time. No no no no no. They lay only in one of them. Occasionally sleep in one of the others, but that’s it. Bah. Chickens. Almost as dumb and irrational as humans.
WTF?
$3500 for a lappy???
Alienware 18 Area-51 AA18250 18″ Gaming Laptop Computer Platinum Collection – Liquid Teal Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX 2.1GHz Processor; NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 24GB GDDR7; 64GB DDR5-6400 RAM; 2TB Solid State Drive
–ok, it’s a lot of lappy but that’s a lot of money. Especially when compared to
Dell 16 DC16251 16″ Laptop Computer – Platinum Silver Intel Core 7 150U 1.2GHz Processor; 32GB DDR5-5200 RAM; 1TB Solid State Drive; Intel Graphics
for only $800.
n
Have you priced a full blown MacBook Pro? $7,350.00 with 128GB of RAM, 8TB SSD, nano-texture screen, 18 core CPU, 40 core GPU. Someone has bought one of those. There are probably content creators, people that render 4K video for a living, that buy a machine like that.
Update to chicken antics: There are at leas tfour more eggs in the coop than there were an hour ago, and one hen laying … in a different bay than usual. The squabbling and bullying and desperation must have broken through the desire to use only the one bay.
I’d expected to find them all sitting around, eager to go into the garden, but I can’t clean the coop with a hen laying and don’t want to run the lawnmower with a hen laying, so here I am back at the computer.
Ultra 9 vs Core 7.
Nvidia discrete GPU with 24 GB vRAM vs Intel Graphics.
Twice the RAM and storage.
Update to the update: 6 eggs laid in the hour after I brought the birds back in from the garden, plus one laid before I let them out. I wasn’t there for the squabbling but no one looks too beat up. Normally they don’t all lay in a cluster like that but I guess something set them all off and each decided that she needed to get in on this.
I now have over 17 dozen eggs in the downstairs fridge plus however many upstairs. Too bad eggs aren’t as expensive as they were last year. I could be a mmmmmmmmmmmillionaire.
I like eggs, a lot. But it’s a big week if I eat a dozen. I generally do 3 eggs up, or4 eggs scrambled, about every other day.
I can’t imagine having 17 dozen eggs just sitting there, waiting.
OBTW, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, the terrible human being but excellent scientific chef, author of “The Food Lab” and early star on the website Serious Eats, had a YT video in the last year with a great tip.
When scrambling eggs or making an omelet, crack the eggs into a bowl, add salt, whisk them together, and let them sit for 15 minutes. It alters the proteins and makes the eggs creamier.
I got to the point where I could actually do a French omelet. Unfortunately, it takes practice and it’s a skill you need to keep practiced. The good news is, your failed omelets become pretty good scrambled eggs.
At the previous job, Clapper gave us the $6000 Intel MacBook Pro with 64 GB RAM and 1 TB storage for VirtualBox running the same images of our software that went on vSphere in production. VirtualBox even supported Terraform scripts to some extent.
Well, well. The Netgear CM3050V that I was testing for Netgear had an email update. The test was over in 2022 with the unit never released to the public for sale. I just got an email from Netgear stating they were never able to get it certified for Xfinity.
Yeh, I sort of already knew that. At one point the modem just quit working on the Xfinity network. No amount of fiddling and support calls got it to work. I purchased a CM2050V to replace the modem and used the CM3050V as a trade-in for $50.00 at BestBuy.
While I was using the CM3050V, until it quit, it worked quite well on the Xfinity network. In my opinion Netgear wanted too much money for the product and I told them so in my testing. Whether that was a factor in not getting the product certified I don’t know.
We have the main fridge on the ground floor and a second full-size fridge and my chest freezer in the basement. The second fridge was intended as a spare in case the main one died but in practice I put most of my leftovers and such in it because my work computer is in the basement and I spend the majority of my time there. (Cue appropriate soundtrack) Plenty of room for eggs. The biggest problem, in fact, is having enough cartons to hold them. Certain people who aren’t me keep throwing them away. Not just tossing them in the recycle bin, where they might be recovered, but crumpling them up. Assuming it’s not deliberate assholery, I can’t figure out what derangement would cause this repeated behovior.
Chicken run is moved. Stuff is mostly cleaned. The hose wasn’t long enough to hose off the roof of the coop and the 100′ hose has a split which is big enough that it needs to be repaired rather than ignored. I’ll fix the hose and then wash down the coop next time. No problem. Besides, even if I hosed it down today, odds are there would be poop on it by this evening anyway. I think I mentioned that chickens have no class, right?
Birds were either in the garden or running loose for several hours today and didn’t object hardly at all to “go home”ing. The only trouble was with one apparently getting lost on the way, but she’s the dumb one. And if you’re being called dumb even for a chicken, you know you’ve been insulted.
The chicken run has an ordinary door (of chicken wire) which swings on hinges, going either into or out from the run. When it’s open, it naturally forms an L with the front wall of the run. The run is a frame of pipes covered with chicken wire, so it can easily be seen through.
The dumb hen will come around the run, intending to go in and join the flock but she gets “stuck” in the inside of the L. She knows that she wants to go that way but she can’t because there’s chicken wire in the way. She’ll move a few inches along the wall or along the door but then go back into the corner because moving made her go farther from her friends. I can try to nudge her along the door so she’ll get to the edge and be able to go in but it usually results in her panicking and flap-running in a random direction, squawking the whole way. Much the same if she’s inside the run and everyone else is out and she’s in the corner closest to them and can’t figure out what to do.
Yes, her brain is the size of a peanut, but come on. You could try just a little harder, couldn’t you?
Back from Tuscalooasa. The boy, err young man, graduated. He signed a lease for an apartment in the work city and will be home later this week. A quick trip for him and the wife to visit family in CA, then a trip back to Tuscaloosa to move everything out of his apartment there and turn in the key.
He will be at home for roughly one more month. It was difficult adjusting to him being at college, and this kind of feels the same, but different too. I am super proud. He was smiling more during the graduation ceremony than I’ve seen in a while. He is excited for his future (so are we). I also enjoyed watching his friends graduate too. A good group of kids. There is hope for the future.
If you allow the aides to use the house WiFi, move them to a guest network restricted to 2.4 GHz. Or buy a router supporting the 6 Ghz band and put your work laptop on that SSID.
If you don’t allow them on WiFi, their phones may be utilizing the “unlicensed spectrum” option of the 5G standard.
A 6GHz router may alleviate that problem too, but I gotta wonder why they are consuming so much bandwidth on duty.
That’s a good idea, Greg. I can change the 5GHz password and keep that band for myself. Didn’t even occur to me that I could or should do that.
@SteveF – there are wi-fi analyzer apps for your phone.
On my Android phone, I have one called “Wifi Analyzer”. Free, and shows access points in the area, signal strength, channel strength, and more. Works great.
Thanks, OldGuy. That didn’t occur to me, either, but I have an excuse in this case: While I do own an Android phone and an Android tablet, I barely use either. I don’t think in terms of what can be done with these devices and their suite of sensors.
@SteveF
Depending on the neighborhood, a post on Freecycle asking for egg cartons might not only get you some but find a buyer if you want to sell some eggs. Check the local farmers market price. Based on your posts I’d call them “wannabe free range”.
For wi-fi in my house I have a Ubiquiti UniFi. Looks like a flying saucer. I went cheap and it only does 2.4 band. I didn’t have anything that used 5g freq at the time.
Two networks. House. No password, just connect. House660 and that was for someone’s PC to connect to the LAN. Don’t know if it is really secure but that’s all moot now.
My set-up works for me. The phone and Kindle use House, no problems. Security? Since w11 ruined file sharing, no worries there.
About that no password…. I’m under a metal roof. There is no wi-fi if you can’t see the house. So no sneaking down and hiding up the driveway behind trees.
6 GHz is even better since support is rare unless you have a newish machine, but a WiFi 6/7 tri band router is a pricey piece of hardware right now thanks to the Orange Man’s ban on new router models entering the US.
I’ve got a pile of old routers, maybe they’ll finally be worth something!
-==
I don’t recall for sure, but didn’t apple phones deprecate 2.4ghz? Or maybe it was WEP. We had an issue with it at my client’s house as we had to maintain backward compatibility for some other stuff. Been a while though.
—- I’ve used wifi analyzer on my android quite a bit at the client’s place looking at signal strength and such. I think there is another with a very odd name, netmonster? that gives even more info. FING is good too, for the network you are connected to.
On the laptop side, I used one that starts with an A but can’t remember the name.
Looking at wifi analyzer, I have an ap with no ssid using WEP visible from my office. Wonder if that’s the gui for my dashcam, or if there is something else around.
n
“Cap, gown and a gator? These wild grad photos are going viral”
https://www.chron.com/texas/article/gator-country-grad-photo-shoot-alligator-22240087.php
I ain’t kissing no dinosaur.
Currently watching “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”, and looking at the movie’s Trivia section on IMDB.
Found out that the squeaking noises of the rats was made by recording chicken sounds and speeding up the sounds. Immediately thought of @SteveF.
And, there were 1000 specially bred rats used in that scene, which were insured by Lloyds of London. They couldn’t use real rats because of the risk of disease. An additional 1000 mechanical rats were used in that scene.
Plus, the ‘seagulls’ in the “Charlemane” scene on the beach (where Sean Connery uses the umbrella to scare them away) were actually pigeons (along with some fake seagulls on sticks in the sand). Pigeons are sometimes called ‘flying rats’. So another connection to @SteveF.
Although I may have too much spare time…
@Lynn
Big Al: “Tastes just like…”
“Priest breaks hip — now Canada apparently wants him dead”
https://www.theblaze.com/news/canadas-proposed-fix-for-priests-broken-hip-assisted-suicide
“Canada appears eager to reach the milestone of 100,000 deaths under its assisted-suicide regime.”
“Rev. Lawrence Holland fell in his bathroom on Christmas Day and suffered a hip fracture. While the 79-year-old Catholic priest went to a nearby hospital in search of help, health care workers at the facility apparently had a final solution in mind: state-facilitated suicide.”
“Since the Canadian federal government under ex-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau legalized medically assisted suicide nationwide in 2016, the so-called Medical Assistance in Dying program has been grossly liberalized.”
So is this the inevitability of government run medical care ?
It is in a Godless DIE-perverted communist/socialist country.
say!
We could show films of the new contract illegal immigrant prison in Haiti, and offer the crimigrants and their attorneys assisted suicide.
https://questionablecontent.net is hacked and down per https://www.jephjacques.com/ .
“If you’re reading this, it’s because questionablecontent.net got hacked and blown up. While we work on fixing it, you can see the most recent comics by clicking here, or get access to comics 24 hours early by subscribing to my Patreon. Thanks for your patience.”
Why do people have to do this to innocent websites ?
@SteveF
17 dozen eggs
We are down to three geriatric hens, 1-3 eggs a day with a miss every few days. In our chicken hey day we had a huge surplus.
we ate a LOT of bacon and egg pie, scrambled eggs, hard boiled eggs. I never tried water glassing but I understand quite a few folks find it a good long term preservation method.
Me, I’d rather eat eggs three times a day than add one more thing at this point.
WPA with TKIP?
Here’s a fun little exercise: Look at Canada’s population, broken down by race/ethnicity and sex.
Then look at the number of time Canada’s “health professionals” recommended MAID, broken down by race/ethnicity and sex.
The results are shocking.
Or rather, they are not surprising at all, in Current Year.
The actually surprising part is that Canada’s “health” officials aren’t even trying to hide it, or weren’t, a few months ago when this was first brought to my attention.
“GameStop’s Ryan Cohen sidesteps questions on how company will pay for eBay deal: ‘The details are on our website’”
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/article/gamestops-ryan-cohen-sidesteps-questions-on-how-company-will-pay-for-ebay-deal-the-details-are-on-our-website-122615524.html
“GameStop (GME) has offered $56 billion in cash and stock to buy (EBAY). But an interview with CEO Ryan Cohen on the math surrounding the deal raised more questions than answers.”
“GameStop is roughly a fourth the size of eBay, with roughly $9 billion of cash on its balance sheet. The company said it has a “highly-confident letter” from TD Bank for $20 billion in debt financing. Meanwhile, eBay’s valuation is $46 billion.”
Wow.
“WKRP in Cincinnati” is back on the air:
Article here, among other places.
Why do you think that Sarah Palin was talking about “death panels” ten years ago? Especially for us old farts, it’s cheaper to MAID us than to treat whatever is wrong.
The ultimate case of TDS:
Obama confesses Trump has caused ‘tension’ in his marriage after Michelle issues dramatic plea
Obola is another pol who can’t let go of the power. I guess he will go to the grave dreaming of a commie FUSA. Just retire and enjoy life. His time is over.
Why do you think that Sarah Palin was talking about “death panels” ten years ago? Especially for us old farts, it’s cheaper to MAID us than to treat whatever is wrong.
Sad but true.
I have been part of death panels twice now, once for my mother-in-law in 1997 ? and for my father last summer. They have a valid place but one needs to proceed with caution. In both cases, the persons were in a coma and could no longer speak for themselves.
It was incredibly sobering when the group of us realized that my father had not survived his gall bladder rupture from around two months before. All of a sudden, I realized that everyone in the hospital room and the virtual family outside were looking at me to make the decision to let Dad go. The hospital could keep Dad’s body going for months on end but we did not want to do that to him. Now I realize that he had a major stroke three days before that day and was essentially gone. It was a relief and a blessing to tell the doctors to stop treatment and take him to the hospice that we had located. His body passed away in three days which told me that we made the right decision.
I wouldn’t deploy WEP.
Most routers will do WPA with TKIP to support older hardware, but you will pay a performance penalty with the WiFi speed capped at 54 Mbps.
Older routers also have relatively constrained RAM for today’s browsing/streaming environment.
I mowed today, an annoyingly short time since the last time I mowed. Springtime + rain = PITA.
Put the birds in the garden. Between my wife and me, the birds were out more than four hours today. Most of that time was in the garden, having a good ol’ time finding worms in the soil my wife is turning. It would be ten times quicker for me to turn the soil, but she complained about how I was doing it and nagged while I was doing it, which translates to my not doing it anymore. You’d think she’d learn, after I stopped washing dishes except for mine and the kids’ and after I stopped washing her car when I washed mine, and after …
But here’s the real point of this report: The temperature was over 65F. Ugh. I wasn’t drowning in sweat but was uncomfortably warm after spending 80 minutes pushing the mower. (This mower has power assist but the top speed is about half of what I normally push it at, so in effect it doesn’t have power assist.) Yes, I realize you southrons won’t sympathize much with that temperature, but note that overnight low was 33F a couple nights ago and the daytime highs lately have been 50ish.
Beautiful day here until the overcast came in. It was 76F mid morning, but IDK how high it eventually got. Did my pickup. Had a nice chat with the auctioneer. He’s not one I get to see very often as he is a fairly long trip past Katy.
Hit Costco for gas on the way home, $3.60/gal. Grabbed some precooked ribs and trash bags too. I’ve been waiting a long time for the kitchen trash bags to go on sale again. Grabbed another bale of paper towels since they were on sale and I was there. Next month it will be charmin again, and the paper towels will be back to normal price.
Turns out the kids fed themselves, so W and I ate some ribs. And a rack went into the fridge.
n
Cool, overcast and windy here.
I put the rest of the pavers down and am not entirely satisfied, but perfect is the enemy of good enough.
Supposed to be 100F by next weekend….
—
Gas went up 10 cents over the last week, btw, $6.40 / gal.
Sixty-Six Percent – What Americans Think Socialism Means
https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2026/05/02/sixty-six_percent_-_what_americans_think_socialism_means_1180329.html
The politicians who sell socialism are morally bankrupt hypocrites who believe that they will get ever more wealth and power from the suckers that believe them.
The people who believe those lies are under-educated after more than two generations of union control of schools, have no knowledge of history, are incapable of critical thought, and have less than half the ability to read, write, and understand numbers compared to children of the fifties and sixties. Their belief is that everything they want will be free when the government puts the white oppressors and dirty capitalists in the camps where they belong.
@nick
Costco for gas on the way home, $3.60/gal
I’m envious. I paid over $5/gallon at Costco this weekend. Granted it was for the prissy car that prefers premium but even regular was nigh on $5/gallon.
Seems like a good summary to me. Both of my kids think certain people have “too much money” and above a certain point it should be taken from them. I was pretty shocked by that, seeing how powerful the schools bias is.
Of course they both think Elon Musk is “dumb” and “definitely NOT” one of the most successful people on the planet, but couldn’t name anyone else – the truest sign of ‘received wisdom’ and not a position arrived at thru thought.
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on a separate and unrelated topic, when will the royal family have enough of megan sparkle and have that problem resolved? can’t wait too long if they want a second marriage and more kids from sap known formerly as prince.
n
@jenny, if I didn’t drive all over doing auction pickups, it wouldn’t even bother me at all. I used to drive about 5000-7000 miles a year. The difference between then and now is about 15 fillups. Current prices, that’s only $750/ additional a year, old prices, $500.
I did the math two different ways so I’m pretty confident I got the numbers right. It’s a difference, but I think gas prices have an outsized psychological effect vs their actual budget impact. Of course I’m comfortably well off. Every dollar has a bigger impact when the total number of dollars available is lower. I do try to remember those days as they are formative on a really deep level.
I subscribe to magazines, media services, have a couple of bad habits that aren’t cheap (pew pews and tiny little fires), drink sodas and fake beer, etc. I could find $100/month to cut out easily, or increase my incoming by that amount. I’m crazy fortunate, but I don’t think I’m that much of an outlier.
There is a lot of fat to cut in most Americans’ lifestyles. Cutting it would be brutal to the macro economic outlook as somehow we’ve turned into a society of pampered princes, enjoying a standard of living unseen in world history.
n
@jenny, if I didn’t drive all over doing auction pickups, it wouldn’t even bother me at all. I used to drive about 5000-7000 miles a year. The difference between then and now is about 15 fillups. Current prices, that’s only $750/ additional a year, old prices, $500.
I am so glad that I can drive up to a gas station and fill up with as much gas as I need. I direly remember the 1973 Arab Oil Crisis for both Texas and the UK, as we spent the summer in the UK while Dad was working with customers in Europe. Getting gasoline was dicey in both places because only Iran was selling crude oil to the USA and Europe.
And then there were the gasoline shortages in the summer of 1979 in Texas and other places as Jimmy Carter’s new DOE, Department of Energy, decided that they knew better how the allocation of gasoline from the Jobbers, the guys with the big tanks and 18 wheeler loading racks, to the gas stations should work. They rerouted all of the gas station delivery trucks using an algorithm that only they understood and failed in a huge way, causing the gas stations in the rural areas to have too much gasoline in their tanks and the urban gas stations to have too little gasoline in their tanks.
BTW, when I filled up last week, my normal $100 to the cashier did not work for the first time ever when the gasoline was $3.89/gallon for the 36 gallon tank in my F-150 4×4. I was short a gallon or two but I let it go.
BTW, if you don’t do it already, it’s worth figuring your “miles per dollar” as well as your ‘miles per gallon’. Energy costs what it costs, in whatever form it’s delivered in. It can be eye opening to compare cheap E85 to the
“expensive” E10 or E15 at the normal pump. Every time I’ve done so, it was a wash because of the differing energy contents. And E85 has significant potential downsides as well as distorting the farm markets.
And for budgeting, miles per dollar allows a direct connection to spending without translating…
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Time for bed,
n